WildStar Dominion Adventure Preview – Riot in the Void

With Carbine Studios slowly ramping up the hype train for their upcoming MMORPG, they’ve recently revealed a new series of content that puts a unique twist on instanced content simply known as “Adventures”. While similar to your typical instanced MMO dungeon, WildStar’s adventures offer a whole lot more to give players a varied and unique experience just about every time they run through them. Each adventure takes place in a simulation hosted by “The Caretaker”, which has various scenarios to choose from and players can tackle each scenario in multiple ways.

As you may or may have not already watched JamesBl0nde’s first look at the Exile’s starting adventure “The Hycrest Insurrection”, now it’s time to read up on how the Dominion handles business with their own starting adventure: “Riot in the Void”, where dominion players must stop exiled convicts from pulling off a full scale prison break. It sure doesn’t sound like a walk in the park, but me and a ragtag group of Cassians, Mecharis and a Draken managed to avert the crisis (nearly) with flying colors, and here’s how it when down:

The adventure starts off with my group in a ship hangar. The caretaker then briefs us on the situation before starting the simulation. Then, a Mechari ICI agent appears before us, telling us more about the prison. Apparently, the prison break plans were already commencing, and we needed to move in without causing a scene. With that, the Dominion offers made us wear prison disguises using holograms.

So with our new disguises dawned, we blended ourselves in with the first crowd of prisoners we saw, slowly attempting to make our way to the front gate. However, a few prisoners were also trying to make a break for the same gate. Almost as soon as they ran out into the open, they were brutally shot to the ground by snipers. Making our way to that gate instantly became a lot harder than we thought…

More and more prisoners would attempt to make it towards the gate, so in order for us to sneak by, we had to wait for the poor saps to take a hit and run from prison group to prison group as the snipers stopped to reload their rifles.

Once we made it to the front gate, we met up with the warden of the facility where he explained all the details. Right then, we had a choice between what situation we would like to handle next. And the options were:

Arms Race - Many of the guard’s weapons were left unsecured throughout the main complex. If they’re not disposed of quickly, the prisoners would gain the upper hand.

Felony Geology - Some of the prisoners have entered Rockbreaker Mine and are trying to crack open the tool sheds. The mining equipment down there could be used as powerful weapons.

Cold Storage - The emergency release protocols have been activated in the Maximum Security Wing! Unless we stop it, the most dangerous Espers will awake from their cryopods.

Since this was our first time participating in an adventure, we went with the first option available: The Arms Race. Seemed like a pretty straight forward objective, but the obstacles set in our path were more than straight and forward. As soon as we made our choice, the prison break had started. We then left the warden’s office only to get ambushed by an angry mob of Humans, Aurins and Mordesh. I was the first in line to take a brutal beating from them with my health being drained by nearly 50%, but my party quickly backed me up, as the Draken warrior taunted them and the Mechari medic tending to my battle wounds using blasts from his resonator. Getting our bearing during the first wave of mobs was a bit of a handful, but after we found our synergy, the ones to follow were no problem for us.

Heading out to the storage room, we found all of the guard weapons that needed to be confiscated. We collected them quickly before any more angry mobs came after us. First job was completed, so we stepped back into the warden’s office for further instructions.

Next up, our group had to step outside into the backyards of the prison in order to put a stop to some Dominion guard bots that had been rewired to fight against us. It seemed like the battle would have been cut and dry, but they sent waves upon waves of guard bots to attack us. The attack was so ridiculous that I almost didn’t make it through it all. Fortunately, my group and I managed to pull through… all except for our main healer, who bit the dust near the end of the last wave. We revived him as soon as possible to move onto the main objective: Taking down the riot ringleader.

A charismatic Granok named Jarak was behind the entire operation, and he wasn’t about to go down without a fight. Battling against Jarak alone was pretty easy at first, because come on; we outnumbered him five to one. But soon after he started to call for help and prison inmates came in to make matters worse for us, by attacking us head on or using esper powers to throw large cargo boxes at us. The battle turned into mass hysteria as we did everything we could to take our foes down while dodging everything in sight. Sadly, I couldn’t dodge all the boxes that were being thrown at me, so I ended up taking the next fall.

After Jarak and his inmate friends were defeated and I was revived, we thought that was the end of the simulation, but we were dead wrong. A new set of choices came up, and we had to decide between stopping a few extra inmates or head back outside to turn on some shield generators. We wanted to pick something that was a little more relaxed after that battle with Jarak, but what we thought would be a walk in the park was more like a jog through a minefield. As soon as we went outside, meteors started falling out of the sky, and we were dodging them like raindrops. If that was bad enough, even MORE prison inmates came out to attack us. It was a fairly frustrating endeavor, but it was also the most exciting part of the adventure so far.

After we had taken care of the shields, there was one final scenario for us to deal with: A Mordesh named Agent Vadim was attempting to escape with four espers assisting him. It was up to us to take him and his guards down, and it wasn’t an easy task, as the espers keep pushing us away using some kind of wind abilities, preventing most of us from getting close. Of course, my charged shots were able to rip through the gusts of wind, just enough to take the first two espers down so we could all move in. After the espers were killed off, Vadim fought against us, using esper powers of his own and flinging all sorts of garbage and equipment at us. One of Vadim’s blasts ended up knocking me off the platform we were fighting on, and I landed right next to the edge of the cliff, which gave me quite a scare.

But I got back on my feet and went back to finish the job. With my group wailing on Vadim as hard as they could, and with a few well-placed shots, we managed to take Vadim down… but not before another member of our group died right before he did.

So that’s where the simulation ended. Rankings appeared on the screen, showcasing how well I did, and I managed to pick up a silver reward. Sadly, I didn’t get any special loot, but one of my teammates did and he was really satisfied with his prize.

Overall, the experience was surprisingly fun and very unique with the amount of options we had to choose from. With all the choices available, there could have been six or more other outcomes to the whole simulation, and that’s not counting all the other random variables that could happen in between. Of course, that was only just a starter adventure, so I can only imagine how varied the other five adventures could be. As the Spring 2014 release for WildStar approaches, we’ll be finding out soon enough.